Mobile App Development: How to Avoid Getting Blacklisted

You just spent $250,000 on your next mobile application. You hired the best mobile app development team to optimize the most cutting-edge functionality available to make your app stand apart from your competitors. You give them plenty of time to work, deciding not to rush things. A week before the big deployment the marketing department starts a massive media blitz, advertising is in full force with targeted ads to the most interested audiences. You spend more money promoting your product as you did developing it.

What’s Going On?

Your analytics sees a 10% drop in downloads after an hour. Then another 10%. Then another 10%.

You do the research. You determine that by the end of the day 16% of all users deleted your app from their phone. It turns out that 95% of them operated it on a 3G network. The more advanced functions you promotes so wildly were too much for the network connection to handle, and the app began to slow down, freeze, and in some cases crash.

Terrible, but not a complete disaster. Or so you think.

You get your mobile app development team together. They have a week to fix it. All functions must work as smoothly on a 3G network as they do on a 4G LTE. You roll out your update ready to see those disgruntled users return en masse.

It doesn’t happen.

Down but not out you get ready for the next update. Over the following month, you make the user interface sharper, and you rush some new functions that were supposed to wait until next quarter. The new and improved version of your mobile application is ready to take the mobile world by storm.

The release date comes and goes. To your astonishment, nothing spectacular happens. There is no growth in user interest.

What happened?

You Were Blacklisted

After the first fiasco, hundreds of users who accessed your mobile application on the 3G network and deleted it panned you on social media. They went to the forums and told everyone that your app doesn’t work. Even the 4G users in Singapore and London who would have no problem with it didn’t bother to give your app a try. They heard it was broken and figured that applied to everyone.

The blacklist doesn’t come and go with the mobile application. It is applied to your brand. Brand reputation takes a long time to grow, and a short time to destroy. Once damaged, it takes an even longer time to repair. New updates, different variations, even other products with your brand name all suffer the customer blacklist.

The Butterfly Effect on Business

An update can result in greater user engagement if you add some really cool stuff. Your users will tell their friends. Other projects your business is working on will flourish. Every mobile application you produce reflects upon your brand. When you do something to increase your company brand, other mobile applications coming from your business, even if not directly related to your app, will gain popularity in the process.

It also works the other way. A blacklist applied to the brand poisons everything else related to it. Current and future products, updates, even totally new innovations will be tainted by being associated with a brand that has the “app that doesn’t work.”

How to Prevent Disaster

Mobile application testing makes sure this doesn’t happen. It is the process of discovering the function and performance glitches in your mobile application before your users do. Anyone who doesn’t perform adequate mobile testing on their application turns their customers into their quality assurance department. The problem with this arrangement is that users don’t report the problems they find to you. They report it to other users.

They don’t list what needs to be fixed on your mobile application on a company memo. They do it on thousands of posts on popular blogs, social media groups, product reviews, and articles about exactly why your app works poorly.

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